POLLED IN THE USA!!! w/ Springsteen, Little Stevie, Clarence, Max and Patty

haha

also: Courtney Cox!

I'm Going Down. One of the most underrated Springsteen tunes.

A recent d/l of the "Blaster Mix" of "Dancing in the Dark" puts that into my No. 1 spot.

All-time, probably "Downbound" or "I'm on Fire" tho

downbound train

born in the u.s.a. poll

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Original version of "Born in the U.S.A." is my fave, but not this version. Back in my Tonight's The Night youth, I would've gone with "Downbound Train" for being the darkest. Now it's "I'm Goin' Down".

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The only line in "Downbound Train" I find clunky: the line about working in the car wash and the rain.

aw i like that line!

Notba disqualifier, let me add.

Why does he work on a railroad gang at the end of the song? Is he in prison?

Yep, the classic Springsteen laid-off-to-prison pipeline.

i didnt think so?
just a worse job than the carwash
ie building railroads was/is also just a straight-up shitty job for some folks
prison isnt the ~only~ way you end up on a railroad gang

Yeah, but he starts off by saying “I had a job” (as if what he’s doing now isn’t even a job)… I thought there was some hidden narrative there maybe.

Declarative sentences. You wanna make something of it?!

I like the carwash line - a little bit of mordant humor in the middle of all the bleakness.

I also thought that he ended up on a prison railroad gang at the end, just because the sections of the song feel more distinct if it goes Good Job --> Bad Job --> Prison, but I guess it could go either way.

The time markers in this song are very odd. It starts out as a clear sequence of events, past to present: "I had a job, I had a girl," "Now I work down at the car wash." But then "Last night I heard your voice" ("last night" in Springsteen meaning any time in the past year or so) takes us into a dream sequence, the drums drop out for the first time in the entire album, everything goes sort of dreamy and floaty, and when it's over we're in a different "now," where the narrator works on a railroad gang. It feels like a fugue state, some unspecified period of lost time where anything could have happened. And my sense is that something did, something bad enough to land our narrator in prison.

And it’s preceded by “Working on the Highway”:

I wake up every morning to the work bell clang
Me and the warden go swinging on the Charlotte County road gang

And what’s our narrator in track 1 doing in the shadow of the penitentiary?

born there iirc

"Shadow of the penitentiary" always made me think it was happening in a place like Joliet.

Joliet, IL I should say. For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joliet_Correctional_Center

Town had a pretty even mix of professional, blue-collar and low-income workers from what I remember, so it could fit the song pretty well.

"BitUSA," I always figured mentioning the penitentiary was another illustration of the limits of his prospects. Refinery or jail (either working or as resident). Or kind of as iirc the Replacements put it, "jail, death or janitor."

Obv. "Working on the Highway” is explicitly an ironic jail song: starts out working on the highway, ends up arrested and put to work on the highway.

"Downbound Train," I don't think he's in jail. He's just got an even shittier job than the car wash. Had a job, had a girl, lost the job, got a new job at the car wash but lost the girl, then lost the car wash job, too, and is now doing something even harder

He didn't start out working on the highway in "Working on the Highway," did he? I thought it was more of a surprise reveal - he's watching everyone go home for the weekend, thinking about his girl, and you think it's just a fun working song, and then plot twist! turns out he's on a road gang and he's not going home for the weekend, and his "pretty little miss" is actually the child he basically kidnapped.

The main character in this song lost his job at the lumber yard and had to take a lesser job at a car wash.

The the line about rain suggests a number of things. First, working at a car wash would feel like you are getting rained on daily because of the water splashing off the cars. Second, it suggests the general malaise that pervades the main character working at the car wash. Third, and most practically, people don’t get their cars washed when it’s raining. So it’s the additional salt in the wounds during his emotional downward spiral and desperation.

https://genius.com/8482051

Paul Schrader had dinner with Springsteen and S.G. Goodman over the weekend, presumably at Springsteen's home.

Ah missed, the caption - yes, at his home.

Doing something as active as committing a crime feels out of character for the "Downbound Train" guy.

he saw the downbound train, the southbound train, the downtown train, the uptown train, the upbound train, but instead he's riding on a downbound train

Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova.

The BitUSA line I’ve always found clunky is – “Sick of sitting around here tryin’ to write this book.” Is that an idiom that Bruce made up? Or is the narrator, like, literally an author?

i like that line

idk what it means really/literally but to me it always connoted generally getting something going, live a full life, get busy living etc idk… it reminds me of the Al Shepard line from Freedom 7 launch “fix your little problem and let’s light this candle”

He needs to write a book so he has pages to start a fire.

The book is on fire and it hurts

He's writing Zen & The Art of Sex In A Car

What that's the best line!!! It's like, yes, this is relatable self-loathing FOMO angst, but it is also a weirdly specific story about a dude who works nights and is trying to write a book.

I'm mentally scanning BitUSA for clunky lines now, and all I'm coming up with is "We'd go walking in the rain/ talking about the pain that from the world we hid." And with that one the tortured syntax gives it such authentic awkward teen poet vibes that it still works for me.

I like how “walking in the rain” reminds of the Ronettes song—which both connects to liking the same music/being teenage, and also sustains the ambiguity around Bobby Jean’s gender and the relationship.

(Also, as much as rhyming “rain” with “pain” may seem straight out Songwriting 101, somehow the line actually does paint a picture, at least for me.)

“And when he leaves me (woah, oh, oh), I'll miss him”—Mann/Weil/Spector

“I check my look my look in the mirror…”

“Hey baby!”

Apparently I’m Frankie two times two times

i’m going down is such a jak

jam ugh